A love letter to history

Ferguson, after all, has a serious purpose. His aim, in the first of what will be a two-volume biography, is to advance the claim that his subject was an idealist. The sound of wry laughter off-stage will not disconcert him. He makes his case strongly and insistently and with no little evidence. There are moments when he is far from persuasive but this is a compelling depiction of the Faust of the latter half of the 20th century.

It is particularly strong on Kissinger’s early years. A Jew born in a German city, he and his immediate family escaped from the imminent Holocaust to New York after watching the rise of the Nazis. He served as a GI in the liberation of Germany and of the concentration camps where dozens of his extended family had died. He used the GI bill to extend his education after the war, becoming a Harvard professor after previously washing shaving brushes and considering becoming an accountant, chemist or doctor. These early sections of the book show Ferguson at his most brilliant, mixing history, philosophy and the personal to powerful effect.

But this biography is at its essence a love letter to history. It is a passion shared by both subject and author. This produces an intellectually stimulating volume but one that ignores much of the personal. Kissinger’s first marriage is almost spectral, dismissed in a couple of paragraphs, one detailing a fatal breach after a row about Kissinger’s alleged infidelities. His long-term relationship with Nancy Maginness occupies a little more space but only because Kissinger spent time in her adopted home city of Paris on both personal and international peace talk matters. This relative absence of the personal is a serious omission. Ferguson may argue that this is a biography of a statesman but it is instructive to know how Kissinger was viewed by those closest to him, for how a man treats an intimate can sometimes point to how he may deal with the fate of millions.

Kissinger, whose Harvard base was a perfect launching pad for his career in advising presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, was hugely influential in nuclear arms strategy, the Berlin crisis and the war in Vietnam. The glimpses of the personal in Ferguson’s first volume show him to be an irritable boss who could rant and rave at those serving him. He was arrogant, egoistic and in the words of Franz Kraemer, his first and most impressive mentor, could be “cold”. In a fleeting moment, his wife is depicted putting meals through his door and retreating while Kissinger laboured on his first book.

His intellect, though, was nurtured by Harvard and made sharp by his devotion to the lessons of history. The idealism that Ferguson attaches to his subject may be disputed but the author makes a good case if in a specific term. This is not idealism as the unrealistic belief in perfection but rather in Kissinger’s belief that values should shape policy.

For example, he believed all policy on the divided post-war Germany should be informed by the right to self-determination. In the crisis of the early 1960s, Kissinger would have been prepared to go to war over this. Curiously, even absurdly, he believed in the theory of a limited nuclear war. Thus Kissinger’s adherence to values, produced by the workings of a gigantic intellect, could have precipitated Armageddon. This link between idealism and action may seem intriguing now but it threatened the very existence of the world in the 1960s.

Ferguson is gentle on Kissinger over this episode and, indeed, on his early involvement in the Vietnam war. It is not correct to say that Kissinger was against the conflict but rather that he despaired at the prosecution of it. Similarly, Ferguson underplays Kissinger’s ambition, particularly in his loyalty to Nelson Rockefeller, a perennial Republican presidential hopeful. Kissinger was a well-remunerated adviser to the New York governor but this did not stop him working for the White House and eventually taking on the role as national security adviser for Nixon, a president he “hated”.

This hints at Ferguson’s protectiveness of his subject. It is no sin in world statesmanship to be ruthless or ambitious. These regular shows of support for Kissinger can be tedious but they cannot significantly detract from a work of considerable substance.

This is the best strain of biography: one of questions rather than answers. It concerns a subject who became a figure of renown, hate and even ridicule. This was in part because of Kissinger’s self-promotion but may owe something to anti-Semitism. After all, the "blood on their hands” accusation extends to such advisers as Mac Bundy, Walt Rostow, Dean Acheson and Robert McNamara but their notoriety is limited in the dark shadow of Kissinger.

If the personal details of Kissinger are neglected, his philosophy is fully investigated and Ferguson can argue, with justification, that this is the essence of the man. “To me there is not right or wrong but many shades in between,” a 25-year-old Kissinger wrote to his parents from the wreckage of Germany. "The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong…Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t even begin to comprehend.”

This Kissinger was already a man apart. Separated from a “world of black and white”, he was preparing to take on the shades of grey in the Cold War and in Vietnam. Ferguson leaves him on the doorstep of Nixon’s White House. A conflict of increasing bloodshed, misery and national wailing beckons. The triumph of the first volume is that it makes the undoubted horror of the second unmissable, even necessary.

Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, is published by Allen Lane, £35